1. Field of the Invention
The invention concerns a method to test a clinical and/or medical-technical system with a number of system components as well as a method for controlling medical-technical examination workflows in such a system.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Large medical apparatuses (also called “modalities”) such as computed tomography systems, magnetic resonance tomography systems, x-ray systems, ultrasound systems, angiography systems and similar apparatuses are extraordinarily complex medical-technical systems. Such systems include a number of quite different system components. In particular, different hardware components such as data acquisition devices, cooling devices, control computers etc. are present in such systems as well as software components such as different types of image evaluation software or applications with special monitoring and control processes. Moreover, many of these system components in turn encompass a number of sub-components. For example, a data acquisition component normally has a signal generation device (for example a radio-frequency system in magnetic resonance tomography or an x-ray radiator in computed tomography) as well as a suitable detector device. Such medical-technical systems can in part be individually assembled from various components, and the individual components must be appropriately matched to one another and correspondingly adjusted in order to achieve an optimal system performance.
The same applies in macroscopic consideration for the employment of such medical-technical systems within their use environment, i.e. within a clinical system. As used herein a “clinical system” means an arrangement that includes as a system component a medical-technical system as described above and at least some of the further components required for operation of the medical-technical system in a clinical workflow, such as preparation rooms, post-processing rooms and in particular peripheral apparatuses and systems such as workstations, networks, printing stations etc. As with the medical-technical system itself, it is also true for such a clinical system that an optimal performance can be achieved only with an optimal selection and settings of the system components under consideration of the respective other components present in the system. An optimal setting of such a clinical system exists when a sufficiently high patient throughput is achieved and thus the wait times for the patients, the downtimes of the apparatuses, and unnecessary wait times for personnel are minimized. Nevertheless, it must be possible to handle emergency situations quickly and without problems and necessary system maintenance cycles of individual components must be preserved, for safety reasons as well as to ensure the technical quality of the examination results.
Generally, new modalities are specified with regard to their performance in the development laboratories on the basis of experimental values, and corresponding tests are conducted. In order to evaluate the possible patient throughput in such a medical-technical system, variations of quite different performance-determining parameters must be taken into account. The interaction of all variants is very complex. An exact conclusion of how such a medical-technical system behaves in the clinical environment is generally not possible. Moreover, such tests are relatively time-consuming and costly due to the number of persons involved therewith.